Jokes and Maps and the Interpretive Lens of Time

            In October, I attended two Themester lectures within only a few days of one another:  Adam Zucker’s “Twelfth Night and the Broken Jest,” and Janelle Jenstad’s “Networks and Neighborhoods in Early Modern London.”  Though these two guest speakers explored drastically different fields of study, I was struck by their common encounters with time and timelessness within Shakespearean studies.

            For the most part, Dr. Zucker’s talk focused on coming to terms with our temporal limitations in understanding Shakespearean jest.  He pointed out several scenes in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature that, despite the most thorough scholarly research, still remain a mystery as to how or why they are funny.  However, even as he expressed his frustration with such enigmatic jests, he affirmed the timelessness of humor, which provides readers of any historical setting an access point to older literature.  Many of the funniest Shakespearean insults (“widdyshins” was a personal favorite of mine) have no linguistic history whatsoever, meaning that even four hundred years later, audiences can still find enjoyment in their slapstick absurdity.  We may not be able to fully understand every joke – and in some cases we are left, like Aguecheek, completely clueless – but we can find some satisfaction in knowing that something funny is happening, and according to Zucker, we should embrace this sense of stupidity (itself a timeless feeling) as part of the reading experience.

            Dr. Jenstad, on the other hand, has little room for the timeless in her construction of the Map of Early Modern London.  In fact, what stood out most to me in her lecture was her assertion that “there is no such thing as ‘Early Modern London.’”  Rather, she argued, the London portrayed by the Agas map is a medieval city under enormous pressure to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population – a task it fails to accomplish.  The definitive contemporary guide to London, John Stowe’s Survey, had to be republished twice within only a few decades, and its latest publication in 1633 was already out-of-date within a few years.  Dr. Jenstad aims reconstruct a picture of a city that existed for a mere blink of an eye between the end of the Elizabethan era and the Cromwell revolution, and thus every concept or piece of information she and her colleagues encounter must be understood in relation to a specific date and location.

            As I considered these varying treatments of temporality, I wondered (for my own amusement) which aspects of Shakespeare’s plays I find more engaging:  the timeless, or the time-tethered.  After thinking this over, I realize that I love discovering time-specific points within Shakespeare’s work (such as his critique of Jacobean bounty in Timon of Athens), but also that I cannot begin to understand these specific facets without being given access to the play by its universal elements (archetypal characters, Timon as a Christ figure, feelings of obligation and generosity, etc.).  I am now interested to learn if my peers process Shakespeare’s work in the same way, or if some reverse the process, starting with historically specific elements and allowing those discoveries to influence their understanding of the plays’ timeless themes.  My hunch is that no one fits squarely into one category or another, but that there is a varying degree of give-and-take between the timeless and the temporal in each person's interpretation.  Research like that of Dr. Zucker and Dr. Jenstad, in providing new insight into old plays, continues this dialogue between universal and particular as we strive to understand Shakespeare's work several centuries removed from his heyday.